Charles Florman

Charles Florman, who has died aged 92, claimed to have eaten in almost every
three-star Michelin restaurant there ever has been; in 1999 he was described
in The Sunday Telegraph as “The man who ate the Michelin Guide”.

Florman enjoyed his first three-star Michelin restaurant meal as a teenager with his father, Carl, who founded the Scandinavian airline SAS. Later, as European director of Fortune magazine and with a healthy expense account, Florman would fly around the continent entertaining contacts and eating up to five lunches and two dinners out every week.

From 1938 he visited every three-star Michelin restaurant in Europe. Later he became global in his ambition, dining at every three-star restaurant in the world until he became too infirm to travel in 2010. His favourite was the Hotel de Ville at Crissier, near Lausanne, Switzerland (formerly known as Girardet, after the chef Fredy Girardet, whom Florman greatly admired). His favourite dishes included scallops, cheese, sweet soufflés and foie gras. None the less, he always insisted on value for money, avoiding overpriced wines; he claimed never to have paid more than £125 per head for a meal.

Florman was one of the first supporters of many of London’s leading restaurateurs, including Nico Ladenis and the Roux brothers; but he tended to dismiss claims that London had overtaken Paris in the gastronomic stakes, advocating the theory that Lyon is the gourmet centre of the world, with quality and creativity slowly decreasing in roughly concentric circles the further away one got.

Florman was a founder member when Egon Ronay launched the British Academy of Gastronomes in 1983, and he presented the Academy’s first meal at Chez Nico. He also had an informal dining club for friends called Les Amis Gourmets, and in 2001 published a guide to the top 200 restaurants in Europe.

Charles Ernest Florman, always known as Charlie, was born in Stockholm on October 30 1920, the son of Carl Florman, a former cavalry officer who in the 1920s founded the company Aerotransport (later Swedish, then Scandinavian, Air Lines) . Charles was not interested in school, though he managed to scrape through his exams by specialising in Theology. Instead he focused on sport.

Carl Florman was strongly anti-Nazi. Following the outbreak of the Second World War (in which Sweden was officially neutral), in 1942 Charles Florman was sent by his father on a secret flight from Stockholm via northern Norway to Aberdeen, in an aircraft carrying ball bearings and other armaments — part of a programme of secret flights to furnish Britain with military supplies against the Luftwaffe and to return Norwegian and British pilots to active duty.

From Scotland, Florman made his way to London, where he stayed with the Hambro family, establishing the London office for his father’s clandestine work. The aircraft in which he had travelled to Britain was shot down on its return flight. After his father’s creation of SAS in 1946, Charles moved to New York to help build the new airline’s network in North America. He returned to Europe in the early 1950s and was appointed to run the international publishing and advertising business of Life magazine, and later Time and then Fortune magazine, overseeing his business from offices in Paris and later London. In 1954 he married his first wife, Madeleine Young.

Back in London in the 1970s, Florman and his wife were grand hosts at their home in Chester Square . In 1974, on the night Lord Lucan bludgeoned to death his children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett, in the basement of his home in Lower Belgrave Street, Lucan appears to have called at the Flormans’ home a few hundred yards away (their daughter was a schoolfriend of the Lucans’ daughter Frances). Alone in the house, Madeleine Florman answered the intercom, but Lucan was so incoherent she refused to answer the door. Bloodstains, which were found to be a mixture of blood groups A and B, were later found on the doorstep.

Despite advancing age and his relentless enjoyment of good food and drink, Florman remained fit and active, listing his hobbies as “Alpine skiing, snorkelling in the Maldives and motoring through France stopping for good meals”.

Charles Florman’s first marriage was dissolved, as was his second, to Lili Haselhorst. He is survived by his son and two daughters.